Immunity for me, not for thee: Trump's flip on prosecuting former presidents

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

As they seek to quell a revolt in their base over the Jeffrey Epstein files, President Donald Trump and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard have offered MAGA voters some tantalizing alternate programming: The prospect of charging Barack Obama with orchestrating a treasonous plot to undermine Trump’s first presidency.

The biggest problem with that is the sheer lack of evidence of any wrongdoing by Obama and other former officials. But even if the Trump administration produced a smoking gun, they’d have to contend with the issue of immunity for former presidents.

Backing up a second, the idea Gabbard has promoted is that Obama pushed for manufactured intelligence about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election to undercut Trump before he took office. The whole thing rests on a series of conflations and misleading claims.

And the biggest findings in that intelligence have been affirmed over and over again, including by Republicans and including by Trump’s now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a major 2020 Senate report. If people who said this stuff engaged in a coup, wasn’t Rubio also complicit?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/immunity-not-thee-trump-flip-221406244.html

[live love laugh]

1. Guessing Epstein is not news anymore.

[Ocelot II]

4. Oh, it's not gone. Sounds like Ro Khanna might be fixing to request or subpoena

Epstein's Big ad Birthday Book from the executors of Epstein's estate.

[Dan]

2. If they arrest Obama

Then we are truly in dangerous times. They would do that to determine how far they could go in arresting their political enemies. We no longer would have a democracy in any shape or form. I guess if something like this happened, all bets are off. I’m sure that Obama would commit suicide due to the embarrassment and shame… not.

[unblock]

3. donnie has never faced any consequences for his abuse of the law.

a major component of his business model has always been to litigate.

he'd hire a contractor to do something on one of his building projects for, say, $100,000. the contractor would do a perfectly reasonable job, then donnie would find something trivial to complain about and refuse to pay anything. this would force the contractor to sue to collect, or donnie would even sue the contractor for breach.

either way, the contractor would be in a position where they would have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to collect, so donnie would offer to "settle" for $70,000 or maybe as low as $30,000. the contractor would invariably settle because there's risk and expense in ongoing litigation and a sure $70k minus $10k in legal fees now is better than an uncertain outcome years later after racking up serious legal bills.

he did this literally thousands of times.

politically, republicans have long abused congressional investigative powers (ask hillary, e.g.) for political advantage. there's rarely any great consequence, it's basically a political free roll for them. they often smear their political opponent if only through relentless if baseless accusations, and they pretty much never suffer for "simply asking questions".

so again, here, donnie is in a position to gain political advantage by attacking democrats, once again abusing the law and his powers of office to do so, and there's not likely to be any real consequence to him.

it's hard to imagine and legal consequence, and the media will never make him pay a political price for this abuse. the most we can hope for from the media is that they dismiss or ignore the claims, so democrats aren't damaged. but the point is, republicans never have to pay a price for this, so they can't lose by trying this crap again and again.